


We All Have Our Time Machines

by Zinnith



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Domestic, Flash Fic, M/M, Mornings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-05
Updated: 2011-05-05
Packaged: 2017-10-19 00:43:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,308
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/195018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zinnith/pseuds/Zinnith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve breathes back the life into an old family tradition. Danny reaps the benefits.</p>
            </blockquote>





	We All Have Our Time Machines

Danny’s used to waking up alone on Sunday mornings. He likes sleeping in, okay, and Steve is incapable of staying in bed once he’s woken up. Danny has tried to train him in the noble art of lazing away a Sunday, but it has turned out to be one of those situations where they have to accommodate each other’s differences in order to create a relationship built on mutual respect (see, all that marriage counselling was good for _something_ , even if this wasn’t exactly the intended purpose.)

So Steve will get up and go for a morning swim, or a run, or maybe a swim and then a run and then he’ll go climb a mountain or hunt down a wild boar or something. Meanwhile Danny will stay in bed, doze a little, enjoy the knowledge of having plenty of time to do absolutely nothing at all while he keeps one ear open for the tell-tale sounds of Gracie waking up. All things considered, it’s not a bad way to spend a Sunday morning, even if it would be even better with Steve still in bed, his long limbs loose and relaxed and his fingers curled around Danny’s wrist.

It’s later than usual when Danny wakes up this morning. He must have managed to drop off again after Steve got up because he feels a little muzzy headed with sleep, slow and languid, and it takes him a while to get going. He stretches and yawns, rolls over onto his back, comes to the conclusion that it’s time to get up. Something smells good. It’s not bacon and eggs and it’s not the pancakes Steve sometimes makes when Gracie stays over. It’s something else, and in his pre-caffeinated state, Danny can’t figure out exactly what.

The situation clearly merits a closer investigation. He can hear voices from downstairs, a clue as good as any. Danny hauls himself out of bed, finds a t-shirt, and pads barefoot over the sunwarmed floor out into the upstairs hallway and down the staircase, letting his fingers trail along the wall.

The first time Danny walked around this house, he hadn’t met Steve yet, only knew about his existence from a casefile and a few framed photos on a shelf. He still remembers the feeling of entering a haunted house, well cared for and preserved, but still full of ghosts, like it had been so long since someone was happy here that the blackness had stuck itself to the walls. It got better after Steve moved back in but there are still shadows lurking in the corners. Danny likes to think that, between himself and Gracie, they have at least begun to chase away Steve’s ghosts.

The voices are coming from the kitchen, so Steve must be back from whatever fresh hell he’s been raising this morning, and Grace must be awake. With a little luck, there will be coffee. Danny rounds a corner, enters the doorway to the kitchen and stops dead in his tracks.

This is something he never expected to see, not in a million years.

Steve McGarrett is baking blueberry muffins. He's covered in flour up to his elbows and there's a blush of redness over his cheekbones. All that’s missing is a frilly little apron. Gracie is kneeling on a chair beside him, carefully spooning batter into a batch of baking cups. The kitchen is a mess with baking ingredients everywhere, squashed blueberries on the floor and plates of muffins fresh from the oven cooling on the countertop.

Danny wants a camera. There needs to be so many pictures of this. He wants to wallpaper the HQ with them and make Chin post them on the net, he wants to enlarge them to poster size and put them up on lampposts all over Honolulu. Most of all, he wants a copy to keep in his wallet, tucked away secret and safe where no one will ever get to it.

His smartphone is wherever his pants ended up last night and it seems like a bad moment to go and hunt down a camera right now. Danny steps into the kitchen instead, slides an arm around Steve’s waist and peers over Gracie’s shoulder.

“What are you doing, huh, monkey? Are all those for me?” he teases and gets rewarded with a smile that almost makes his chest burst because there’s not enough room in his heart for all the love he has for his little girl.

“They are special Sunday muffins,” Gracie explains. She has a smudge of batter on her cheek and Danny uses his thumb to rub it away, ruffling her hair when he’s done.

“Is that so? What’s special about them?” he asks, and promptly gets interrupted when Steve leans in to brush his lips over Danny’s cheek and skillfully manages to get flour all over his t-shirt in the process.

“Morning, Danno,” Steve says against his skin. Danny murmurs something appreciative in response and gets another kiss. “Pour us some coffee and set the table. These will be done in ten minutes.”

After a brief inner debate regarding more kisses versus coffee, Danny decides that being awake will hopefully lead to more kisses later so he follows orders, finds bread and cereal and orange juice and puts muffins into a bread basket.

He sits down at the table with his coffee and waits for Steve and Gracie to finish up and come and join him. There are small notches in the tabletop and he runs his thumb over them, wondering absentmindedly what made them. Maybe cutlery handled by hungry McGarrett children many years ago?

The muffins are fantastic and Danny eats more of them than he probably should. Grace puts away at least two before she’s had enough and happily runs off to watch cartoons.

Steve has eaten half a muffin and is in the process of taking the rest of it apart into a little heap of crumbs. Danny figures it’s just Steve’s usual neurotic approach to baked goods, the one that makes him think that eating a malasada means he has to swim for an hour. The proper appreciation of food is another skill Danny has been trying to train Steve in, and he’s not going to give up on it any time soon.

“These are really good,” he says, reaching for another muffin even though he knows he’ll never be able to finish it.

“It’s my mother’s recipe,” Steve says. “She always used to go up early on Sundays to bake blueberry muffins for breakfast. I remembered it this morning, waking up to the smell of them.”

And isn’t that a bit of a revelation? Steve talks about his father sometimes, but he never shares any memories of his mom. Danny imagines that finding out that her death was actually murder must have been like losing her all over again, but Steve hasn’t said a word about it. Whatever he might be feeling about it only surfaces in less guarded moments with the kind of lost and lonely look that makes Danny instinctively want to drive Steve straight to a top notch therapist and not take him home again until he’s at least okay. If only it was that easy.

Danny lets go of his muffin and takes Steve’s hand instead, squeezes his fingers, the gun calluses and the saltwater-rough skin, and holds on.

“I like that,” he says. “That’s a good memory, babe. Let’s do this every Sunday, okay?”

Steve looks up and smiles, that warm, fond, open smile that Danny can’t get enough of. Their hands are joined over the table and suddenly Danny can’t wait for next Sunday and the Sunday after that. He’ll even get up early so he can sit here, in this exact spot, and watch Steve keep his mother's love for her family alive.

\- fin -


End file.
